Harlem Renaissance: Fiction and Poetry

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In 1853 William Wells Brown's (c. 1816–1884)Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States was published outside the United States. (Brown could find no American publisher willing to publish his work.) An abolitionist lecturer, historian, and essayist, Brown wrote this story of a young slave girl—who is supposedly the daughter of U.S. president Thomas Jefferson and one of the women slaves on his plan-tation—more as an antislavery document than as a work of literature. Much more carefully crafted prose fills the pages of Harriet E. Wilson's (c. 1828–c. 1863) Our Nig (1859), the first novel published in the United States by a black writer and the first published anywhere in the world by a black woman. The story centers on the experiences of a plucky biracial girl (her father is a wealthy white man, her mother a black servant) in the northern United States and reveals how some whites who claim to be Christians nevertheless treat black people unjustly. Other African American novels of the nineteenth century include The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb, which anticipates a major concern of Harlem Renaissance fiction with its emphasis on the inner conflicts of light-skinned black people who are able to "pass" as white; and Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859), a radical work about black revolt written by the energetic and accomplished Martin Delany (1812–1885) who was a journalist, physician, Civil War officer, and justice of the peace (though, according to some critics, not much of a novelist).

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